The Third Annual Living Traditions Festival Nears 2,000 Attendees
-The following first appeared in Floyd Times on August 27, 2025
The Floyd Living Traditions Festival is a free-to-the-public annual celebration of mountain culture and heritage. Presented by The Floyd Center for the Arts (FCA) and The Handmade Music School (HMS), this year’s festival featured over 25 artisan booths to explore, Appalachian living demonstrations and exhibits, music performances, craft workshops, kid’s activities, dance classes, local food trucks and more.
Commenting on the day’s great turnout, former FCA board member Jason Gallimore said, “In this high-tech world of online interactions, people are interested in nostalgia. People love coming out to experience this music, people on spinning wheels and people making brooms. People are craving authenticity.”
The Little River Missionary Baptist Church opened the festival with Gospel music performances at the HMS’s outdoor stage. Old-time and bluegrass bands performed throughout the day. There were musical tributes to Floyd’s famed musicians of the past, Randall Hylton and the Floyd County Ramblers. HMS students presented ensemble performances and a full-stage jam with flat-footers dancing on boards nearby.
“I’m proud to be a part of this event,” announced HMS’s Executive Director Dylan Locke from the stage. He thanked the Music School teachers, the event sponsors and everyone who helped make the festival a success. Speaking about the HMS, he said, “It’s about lots of kids learning music and parents learning music. It’s really about a lifestyle and not about lessons. It’s a joyful experience where people are having fun being together, collaborating and being creative in this world.”
Outside, a community art project, hosted by the FCA, drew attention and participants. Headed up by FCA program director Erin Bloodgood, a large pegboard spelling out FLOYD was being cross-stitched with yarn in the themed colors of this year’s festival, green, yellow, blue, orange and purple, the same colors as the festival T-shirts that staff and volunteers wore.
Local artist Charlotte Atkins was drawing portraits. There were demonstrations in blacksmithing, barn quilt making, basket making, soap making, chainsaw carving and more. Some of the interactive demonstrations – working with clay, making corn husk dolls and print making – were especially popular with the younger crowd.
At the FCA’s hay bale Loom Barn, fabric artists demonstrated weaving, spinning, rag rug making and preparing homegrown flax (a tall grass) for spinning. Rona Vrooman, a master gardener with the Virginia Cooperative Extension and a FCA weaving teacher explained that the Loom Barn houses donated looms used for teaching and demonstrations.
“We did a project this year in conjunction with the FCA to create a dye garden and grew plants used for dying,” Vrooman said. The dye garden plants were on display, along with skeins of colored yarn that had been dyed with plant material.
Inside the FCA barn building, there was a silent auction of artful items and a Floyd Quilt Guild exhibit. Visitors engaged in Stained Glass and Needle Felting workshops. There was storytelling on the pottery porch and potters were in the studio demonstrating bowl making in preparation for the April 27 Empty Bowls event, a fundraiser for the New River Community Action Center’s Backpack Program that benefits Floyd County school students.
Upstairs, Sophie Moeckel taught classes in flatfooting and in-the-round square dancing. There was an art talk with artist Charlie Brouwer, Learning to See Again: Loss and Resillence. Brouwer, who became legally blind in 2022, has learned to see the world in new ways and continues making art. A solo exhibit of his work, was located in the Falcon Gallery.
A special treat for festival attendees was viewing the Hayloft Gallery’s Kindly Mirrors exhibit, presented by the Old Church Gallery, Floyd County’s Cultural Arts Museum. The photographs, taken with an old-time Brownie camera, depict ordinary days of life in the county between 1912 and 1917. The captivating and beautifully composed photos were saved, restored and curated by an Old Church Gallery team, Ricky Cox, Catherine Pauley and Alice Slusher.
Not a drop of rain. “It was a beautiful day,” FCA executive director Keela Dooley Marshall later said. “Attendance clearly grew again this year, with a steady stream of people filling the campus all day.” She stated that they were still waiting for final attendance calculations but noted attendance grew from 1200 the first year to 1600 last year. An early estimate for this year is 1800 or more.
Dooley Marshall stated that the festival was an opportunity for both the FCA and the HMS to preview what both organizations offer year-round and that visitors picked up the new FCA fall/winter catalog and some signed up for future classes.
“This is the best festival we have ever been to,” she reported hearing a visitor from Georgia say. “We’ve already put next year’s date in our calendar and will come back just for it!” the visitor added.
